


Deeper and More Real

by kjack89



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Developing Relationship, Fluff, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 10:19:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kjack89/pseuds/kjack89
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The beginning of Joly, Bossuet and Musichetta's relationship. Joly-centric</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deeper and More Real

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from a Dean Spade quote: “The point for me is to create relationships based on deeper and more real notions of trust. So that love becomes defined not by sexual exclusivity, but by actual respect, concern, commitment to act with kind intentions, accountability for our actions, and a desire for mutual growth.”
> 
> The only things that belong to me are my various typos. Sadly.

People didn’t understand how Joly could be a doctor and also have hypochondria. “Aren’t you constantly worried you’ll catch something from your patients?” they’d ask him. “And aren’t hospitals swarming with germs?”

Joly would smile and patiently explain the difference between hypochondria and mysophobia and try and leave it at that. Because what he couldn’t explain was how being a doctor steadied him, centered him; being able to fix people, to cure their ailments, put any thought of his own problems far from his head. He didn’t have time to dwell on whether the mild rash he had most likely gotten from brushing against a pine tree was in fact the beginning stages of necrotizing fasciitis, didn’t have time to listen to the slight cough he had with his own stethoscope to determine if he could hear rales in his lungs.

Of course, during the times when he wasn’t working, wasn’t at the hospital, things could get bad. The time he was convinced he had contracted HIV, for instance, and spent half an hour in hysterics on the floor of his bathroom, unable to stand or even move, mentally dredging through all the upcoming symptoms as his non-existant HIV progressed into AIDS. Or when he went to three different urgent care facilities in three different towns, convinced that his bruises were a sign of leukemia.

Which was why he tended to work as often as he could, knowing that going back to his empty apartment would only give him more time to sit and think of everything going wrong within his body (when the only thing wrong with him was in his brain).

And so it was a Saturday afternoon, which was supposed to be Joly’s day off, but he had volunteered for a shift in the emergency room. There had barely been a five-minute lull throughout the day, which suited Joly just fine, and he barely listened to the nurse as he was handed another of a long line of charts and steered towards examining room five, only barely catching the pertinent information: “Lesgle…broken wrist…several old breaks and contusions…possible balance issues…”

So Joly tugged the curtain to the side and stepped into the room, eyes glued to the clipboard. “Good afternoon, Monsieur, uh, Lesgle, my name’s Dr. Joly and you appear to have broken your wrist?”

“So they tell me,” the patient replied easily, and Joly glanced up, freezing in place as he locked eyes with the patient, a handsome man in his late twenties who was completely bald. “Wouldn’t be my first broken wrist, so I can’t say I’m too surprised.”

Joly blinked and looked down, flipping through the patient’s medical history. “No, if your history is correct, this would be your…fifth broken wrist?” He frowned at Lesgle, whose grin grew wider. “Given the sheer amount of injuries you’ve sustained, I think it’s safe to say you could be considered, ah, clumsy, Monsieur Lesgle, which begs the question of whether you’ve been examined for any inner ear issues that could throw off your balance, or—”

“Just call me Lesgle,” he interrupted, still smiling widely. “Monsieur doesn’t really fit me so much.”

Feeling a blush start to rise in his cheeks, Joly nodded. “Right. Lesgle. Well, like I said, sometimes clumsiness can be attributed to—”

“Oh, I’m not clumsy,” Lesgle informed him cheerfully. “I have perfect eyesight and my balance is superb. Trust me - I’ve been referred to just about every doctor there is to see if there’s a medical reason for any of this. But I’m not clumsy. I’m just really, really unlucky. And typically in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Despite himself, Joly peered over the medical chart at Lesgle, at the wide smile he was giving him, and found himself smiling slightly as well. “What do you mean, in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

Lesgle’s smile widened. “Well, let’s see…” He pointed at his crooked nose, which clearly had been broken several times. “The first time I broke my nose, I was just walking along, minding my own business, and someone opened a door into my nose.” Joly couldn’t help but chuckle slightly, and Lesgle added, “Oh, it gets better. The second time I broke my nose, the same exact thing happened.”

He continued in this fashion, telling Joly all about his various injuries, and Joly laughed and gasped along with the stories. Lesgle was right - he  _wasn’t_ clumsy, he was just extraordinarily unlucky. Even just one of these stories - the time he broke his arm from an elevator that malfunctioned and didn’t stop the doors closing in time, or the time he broke his leg from slipping on a patch of ice in the middle of June ( _that_  was a long story) - would be wholly unlikely to happen, but to not only have them happen, to have them all happen to  _one_  person…that was the actual definition of unlucky.

During all these stories, Joly learned a lot about Lesgle, too, about his friends and his interests, and he realized that he had been smiling the entire time, more than he had in days. And that he hadn’t once thought about whether his lack of appetite from earlier could be attributed to Hepatitis A. Lesgle, with his wide smile and his honest eyes and his cheerful demeanor, seemed to be just as calming and centering as work normally was for Joly, and that made Joly cough and blush and say quickly, “Well, Lesgle, we should get your wrist set so that you can get going. Hopefully you have someone to take care of you when you get out, a girlfriend or someone.”

Lesgle looked surprised. “Oh, I don’t have a girlfriend.”

Joly tried to ignore the way his heart leapt at that information. “Oh?” he asked mildly, grabbing the necessary supplied to set Lesgle’s wrist.

“Nope. Single man, right here. Not that I necessarily want to be, if you know what I mean.” Lesgle will still smiling at him warmly and Joly was convinced that his face was bright red.

“I’m not entirely sure that I do, Lesgle,” he murmured, avoiding his gaze as he sat down next to him and started to apply the splint and bandages.

Lesgle was silent for a few minutes before saying off-handedly, “You know, most of my friends don’t call me Lesgle.”

Joly still didn’t look up, though his curiosity was peaked. “What do they call you, then?”

“It’s a great nickname,” Lesgle told him. “And by great, what I secretly mean is a terrible pun that my friends thought they were really clever to have figured out but that’s actually incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever heard it.”

Despite his best efforts, Joly couldn’t help but laugh slightly at that. “Are you going to tell me what it is, or do I have to guess?”

Lesgle smiled at him. “Oh, I’ll tell you what it is, on one condition: go out on a date with me.”

Joly’s hands fluttered to a halt against Lesgle’s arm, and he blushed and swallowed hard. “I, uh, I’m incredibly flattered, but I can’t,” he said, his voice sounding strange even to him. “I can’t date a patient.”

“Once I walk out of here, I won’t technically be your patient anymore,” Lesgle pointed out brightly.

Chuckling darkly, Joly ducked his head and finished applying the bandage. “At least not til the next time you break yourself.”

Lesgle reached out and covered Joly’s hand with his free one. “But then you’ll be there to help me anyway,” he pointed out quietly. “C’mon, Dr. Joly. Just give me a chance.” When Joly didn’t say anything, biting his lip indecisively, Lesgle leaned in and kissed him, lightly, smiling against his lips when Joly automatically reached out to cup his cheek. “Please?”

“Fine,” Joly sighed, a smile battling its way across his face. “Fine, I’ll go out with you.” He grabbed his business card out of his white coat’s pocket and scribbled his cell phone number across the back. “Give me a call when your arm is feeling better and we’ll set something up, alright?”

He had stood to head to the door when Lesgle told him, “By the way: my friends call me Bossuet.”

“Bossuet,” he repeated, half-smiling at the sound of it. “I like that.”

Then to his complete surprise, he bent and kissed Bossuet again before darting out of the room, blushing furiously. He was too busy thinking of Bossuet the rest of the day to even try and diagnose one of his many ailments.

As it was, Bossuet called him the next day, claiming that his arm felt fine, but Joly insisted on going to Bossuet’s instead of going out anywhere. “That’s forward of you,” Bossuet told him, but his grin was evident even through the phone.

When Joly arrived at Bossuet’s building, he was let in by Bossuet’s downstairs neighbor, a pretty woman named Musichetta, who chattered at him as she walked him upstairs: “I’ve been telling him he should find a doctor to date forever, someone who can patch him up, I just didn’t think he’d take my word for it.”

Musichetta, it seemed, had been Bossuet’s go-to person for a long time, always there to help when he needed it, and she lingered in Bossuet’s doorway, watching as Joly kissed him lightly - but only after checking on his wrist - a smile flickering across her face. She was a woman who knew what she wanted, and at the moment, what she wanted was those two men.

Still, it didn’t hurt to rush these kinds of things, so she went back down to her apartment to make herself a cup of tea and to plan.

Not even two weeks later, any plans she had made were tossed aside when Joly knocked on her apartment door in a panic, the words spilling out in a rush about how he had been trying to find Bossuet because he just knew that he had felt a growth, just knew that it was a tumor, and Musichetta listened and calmed him down in much the way that Bossuet was able, and then when he was calm and rational (and blushing, embarrassed as always by the side of him that he couldn’t control), she kissed his forehead and told him it was fine.

Neither knew how it happened, or who kissed whom first, but then they were kissing, until Joly pulled back and looked horrified. “Bossuet—” he started, and Musichetta agreed.

“I agree completely. It would be much better with him involved too.”

And so it came to be. Joly had found two people who were not only willing to put up with his neuroses, but who even helped soothe it just by their very presence. And as he lay in between them in bed one night, Bossuet snuggled against his side, head on Joly’s chest, as Musichetta snored contentedly into his shoulder, he really couldn’t ask for more than that.


End file.
